By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

“Annihilation” and the Modes of Becoming

Alex
Garland’s Annihilation (2018) — his
loose cinematic adaptation of the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy — recently had
its international release on the Netflix video streaming platform. The movie
and the eponymous book it is based on are of interest to political theorists as
they vividly illustrate the modes of becoming described by the philosophers
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

The
movie depicts the aftermath of meteorite impact on Earth: the impact site
becomes the center of a rapidly-expanding zone of transformation called “the
Shimmer.” Within the Shimmer, objects lose their discrete natures and undergo
extreme forms of hybridization and other modes of transformation, collapsing
the order of Nature described in the opening lines of the famous poem by the
13th-century Persian mystic Rumi:

“I
died as mineral and became a plant,

I
died as plant and rose to animal,

I
died as animal and I was Man.”

While hybridization is a
familiar phenomenon in our living environment and in our social life — many of
our cuisines, for instance, include dishes like Hawaii’s Spam musubi that are
hybrids from different cultures — those that occur in the Shimmer are wild and
aggressively transgressive (Lim, 2014, pp. 489-490). Within the Shimmer, animals
become hybridized with plants, humans become hybridized with animals, and there
are even stranger transformations — plants grow into human-like forms; humans
become plants; and humans are even hybridized with minerals.

In
the zone of transformation of the Shimmer, the assemblage of physical and
mental parts that constitute the body decomposes, leaving the individual
physical and mental parts of the original assemblage to be remixed with other
decomposing assemblages. In one particularly horrifying sequence in the movie,
a bear kills a woman, and the final moments of her mental life are extracted
and remixed into the mutating assemblage of the bear, giving the recomposed
bear a voice that is the woman’s dying scream. As another character describes
it, the Shimmer offers the prospect of complete annihilation as all the
constituent particles of everything within it will eventually be fully mixed
with all the other particles in the zone.

This
makes Annihilation different from
other science-fiction movies with similar premises. For example, while Ridley
Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017) also
features violent hybridizations, here the transformations are goal-directed — the
xenomorph hybrids are genetically engineered by the android David for the
purpose of creating the perfect bioweapon to destroy humankind. The Shimmer, in
contrast, transforms just for the sake of transformation. It is what Deleuze
and Guattari would describe as a total field of deterritorialization: within
its changing borders all established meanings are erased. As one of the
characters in Annihilation puts it,
being in the Shimmer is like experiencing accelerated dementia. Not only does
the body break down, the mind does too, and the person who enters the Shimmer
will not be the same as the one who leaves.

For
political theorists hoping to understand the many ways people interact with
power — obtaining it, living with it, or resisting it — the work of Deleuze and
Guattari is an invaluable resource. As Simon O’Sullivan (2006)
explains, “what I found in their writing was a different conception of what
intellectual work might involve; no longer the endless critique of previous
bodies of knowledge (or not just this) but the creative invention of concepts”
(p. 11). Just as the creative genius of Deleuze and Guattari gave rise to a cornucopia
of new concepts, Annihilation gives
us a sense of what some of their concepts may look like in the real world.

Becoming-animal

One
example is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, which Gerald Bruns (2007)
warns is “among the most recondite of their concepts, but also arguably one of
the most interesting” (p. 703). Cliff Stagoll (2010) notes that the Deleuze and
Guattari understand the human subject as ever always becoming other: “The human
subject … ought not to be conceived as a stable, rational individual,
experiencing changes but remaining, principally, the same person. Rather …
one’s self must be conceived as a constantly changing assemblage of forces, an
epiphenomenon arising from chance confluences of languages, organisms,
societies, expectations, laws and so on” (p. 27).

Becoming-animal
is one such mode of self-transformation — one that can lead the self to a life
of pure sensation: “To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake
out a path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a
continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world
of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations,
signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of
deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, p.
13). It is also a life of sociality: “A becoming-animal always involves a pack,
a band, a population, a peopling, in short a multiplicity” (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987, p. 239). The groups which come closest to those who have
become-animal are those whose members have chosen to live in the wilderness away
from modern society. Despite their being deprived of the conveniences of modern
industrial life, they have the freedom to live in “a world of pure intensities.”
As Stagoll (2010) writes, Deleuze and Guattari are “philosophers of a kind of
freedom for which we may have not yet developed a concept” (p. 716).

While
mineralization is a common biological phenomenon, the accelerated and extreme
forms of mineralization presented in Annihilation transgress these biological norms.

However,
there is the danger of romanticizing those who have become-animal, as that line
of becoming can lead to complete disorganization and anarchy — the mode of
being which Deleuze and Guattari represent with the image of the Body without
Organs (BwO). It is important to note that the BwO is not a body that has no
organs. Rather, it is a body that is “opposed to the organization of the
organs” (Message, 2010, p. 38). In Annihilation,
some of the explorers who have entered the Shimmer find themselves transforming
into BwOs. In one disturbing sequence, a character’s stomach is sliced open to
reveal that his guts have been transformed into slithering eel-like creatures.
The organs, having rebelled against their appointed biological roles in the
body, proceed along their independent lines of becoming, thereby dooming the
body to its death. In the political arena, the model of the BwO would fit those
rebellions which descend into violent chaos with the various rebel factions
turning on one another, as happened in the 1990s to the West African nations of
Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Becoming-plant

Moving
away from the radical disintegration of the BwO is the alternative line of
transformation of becoming-plant. In Annihilation,
a traumatized and depressed character finds herself in a peaceful area of the
Shimmer where its former human inhabitants appear to have transformed into
plants (or where the plants have attempted to transform into humans, or both),
and in a visually startling scene she embraces this peaceful mode of becoming gifted
to her by the Shimmer. When her colleague goes to look for her, the plant-human
that she has transformed into is indistinguishable from the others in the
field.

Karen Houle (2011)
notes that becoming-plant, unlike becoming-animal or becoming a BwO, results in
a profoundly collective mode of being: “the teloi or ‘self-realization’ of
plant communication is neither strictly individual nor even species-specific
but is accomplished in and through radical kinships, through a fantastically
versatile and multi-directional capacity to harmonize a multiplicity of actions.”
This vegetal communications network is constructed through the plants’ complex and
synchronized secretions of chemicals which affect the surrounding soil and the
neighboring plant and animal life (pp. 98-107). In political terms,
becoming-plant has “massive political and ethical implications … It credits the
accomplishment of identity and intimacy as a radically collective achievement,
crossing faculties, bodies, phyla and even the most basic cut we so confidently
declare: the organic and the inorganic” (pp. 111-112).

Becoming-mineral

The
last mode of becoming presented in Annihilation that I wish to discuss is becoming-mineral. While mineralization is a common
biological phenomenon — allowing plants and animals to persist in mineralized
forms across eons of time, as was recently seen when several new fossilized forests were
discovered in Antarctica — the accelerated and extreme forms of mineralization presented
in Annihilation transgress these biological
norms. As the explorers venture deeper into the Shimmer, they come across
crystalline trees and a colleague from an earlier expedition whose severely transformed
body had undergone becoming-animal, becoming-plant, and becoming-mineral.

With
respect to political change, the transformative process of becoming-mineral
would fit with Deleuze and
Guattari’s geophilosophy: “Insofar as countries can be seen
as vast assemblages of components and forces (ranging from the individual
bodies of their inhabitants and smaller-scale assemblages like societies,
institutions and markets, to the natural forces of climate and geology, as well
as social forces, including culture, politics and economics), they … may be
abstracted to … largescale structures in the physical world; for example,
geological strata” (Lim, 2015, p. 3). In the dimension of social life, such
strata may be understood as consisting of the remnants of earlier eras of the
political economy which form the foundations for the subsequent eras:

“At
a broader temporal level, stratification may be discerned in not just the
historical formation of social hierarchies, but also in the complex formation
and transformation of political economies. At this level of analysis, the
political economy of a territory prior to colonization may be seen to
constitute a stratum that is buried below that of the colonial period, and
likewise, the political economy of the period of independence may be seen as
being built on the stratum of the colonial political economy. In this same way,
one may view neoliberal Cambodia as emerging from the stratum of its
revolutionary period of genocide and politicide” (Lim, 2015, p. 3).

It
is in these strata where bodies become-mineral. While the individuals who lost
their lives to the political economies of the earlier eras may be forgotten by
the succeeding generations, their bodies, either mineralized while buried in
the land — as happened with many of the Cambodians who were murdered in the
Khmer Rouge’s killing fields — or even carbonized into ash, persist as physical
traces in the buried geological strata of the land on top of which the current population
of the country lives and works. In this way, becoming-mineral grants
individuals the possibility of someday emerging into the consciousness of
future generations, as was the case with the skeletonized
remains of the Khmer Rouge’s victims who — decades after
their mass killings — were retrieved by genocide researchers to be documented
as evidence of their killers’ crimes against humanity. In this manner,
becoming-mineral offers the prospect of not just remembrance but also justice.

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP), and is the lead editor of China and Southeast Asia in the Xi Jinping Era (Lexington Books 2019) and the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.